Wow. I wish that I could say that I was surprised, but after renting the upstairs of a house and having the downstairs tenant insisting having the heater at ludicrous levels and talking about nearly freezing to death while I was baking and had big boxes over every heater vent... then I found out it was because they left the window open and never thought to check. This was after a month, in November.

After that, no example of human stupidity will surprise me. Or at least that's what I want to believe.

When I was a kid, I liked getting rare denominations like both kinds of dollar coins, 2 dollar bills, and even had some old coins like the nickel one cent coins.

As for game length, I recently heard the best explanation of why overly long games are bad when listening to old episodes of the TOVG podcast: It's very much like a clingy relationship. "Come on. I just want to try other games""No! You have to spend all your time with me! Over 100 hours!"

And then, if you do take a break and go back, you find that the relationship is gone.

Like they even needed this to make their network even more unusable. It already takes forever for my phone to load up even simple web pages. Video? Don't even bother.And this is on a supposedly 4g connection.

Of course, the signal drops to near nothing if I were to say, go downstairs in my house, and my workplace (even outside) and even downtown are pretty much dead zones.

Yeah. It was a bit of a project to do it. Floppies are really delicate, so I bought an Atari -> USB adapter a while back and copied all that I could.

Though I kind of curse my folks for being so poor "Backup Main Programs Disk" ended up being entirely different than "Main Programs Disk" because they wouldn't spring for extra floppies (which extended into the AOL days, when we exclusively used those... and AOL used bargain-basement quality media; lots of painful data loss happened there)

BUT... I saved what I could, and my Lode Runner levels were part of it.I emailed myself the entire archive and put backups all over the place. Nothing short of the internet going out and my house going up in flames will destroy them now.

Though the rom of the Atari XE version of Lode Runner is kind of hard to find (even though the cartridge itself is common). Sites generally like to have the inferior Atari 800 version, instead. It really wouldn't be practical to hook up an *actual* Atari these days.

I lived in Santa Clara for a year, and let me tell you, that's one expensive place to live.

*However* I'm looking on Craigslist right now, and am finding plenty of room for rent options in San Francisco proper around the $1200 range. If you're single, you really don't need more than that.

And if you want to raise a family in a house... do it someplace cheaper. The SF Bay area is a place to work hard, earn a lot of money, burn out from all the hours, and leave for someplace cheaper and with shorter work days.

Agent-Zero wrote on Dec 21, 2016, 14:58:always preferred Magic Carpet ... now that would be a good reboot

Magic Carpets were great games... There have been a few hobby developed attempts over the years, including my own, but they die off before getting anywhere near completion, including my own heh.

Oh, man, I loved Magic Carpet. That and Descent were my thing back in the day.

...And I'm still sore over the dev of Arcane Worlds abandoning it. Even if what we saw wasn't great, just the promise of a Magic Carpet-style game got me really excited.

But, I'm really glad that after all these years, Descent-like games are getting a bit of a resurgence. Retrovirus, Sublevel Zero, NeonXSZ, Overload, and Descent: Underground. My favorite style of FPS gameplay is coming back!